Odi et amo

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

The past two decades have been quite an experience.  I have seen so many things come and go from my life.  I have built things, some without noticing and others with great care and deliberation.  I have broken things down, some carefully and some not so much.  Hardest of all, from my perspective as an agent who aspires to control life: I have seen things broken, despite all I tried to do to save them.  Some of the things I see broken now are things I cannot look upon easily.  I see many of my most long-cherished illusions lying dead and destroyed beyond all hope of recovery (redemption, resurrection).  I think it is fair to say that my identity, the persona or mask that I use to identify myself alone and in company, is currently broken (or breaking: I keep trying to patch new identities together only to find at the last minute that they simply cannot hold).

Buddhism has been a great blessing in that it allows me to deal honestly with the reality I experience, a reality in which my self does not exist as something simply, intelligibly, coherently permanent.  But the practical utility of Buddhism is limited, since the reality I experience is one in which retirement from samsara is impossible.  I would like to flee into the wilderness, to leave society with all its impossible expectations that I have never met (and will probably never meet), to die to the world and then see if that might teach me how to love it without killing it (or myself).  My reality is closer to that of Kierkegaard: my self might be called an illusion, a fiction without any permanence (speaking ontologically, objectively), but it is an illusion I cannot shake (speaking epistemologically, subjectively).  I must carry that illusion with me in the world, where I must live (as other selves depend on me), and where it is broken beyond hope of repair (I begin to suspect).

My self might be unreal, ontologically, but from the perspective I must inhabit, it is eternal and inescapable.  I have watched it die a thousand deaths without perishing.  I have seen it smashed and smashed again, on a thousand different battlefields, and still it lives on.  Its life is changed by every loss, torn and disfigured by its continual failure to achieve victory (that may be ontologically impossible, but is subjectively necessary, at least as a goal, an aspiration).  I am Prometheus, the fool who finds himself waging useless war with the universe.  For my sins, for the mask my self embodies, I must stand chained on a mountaintop while Zeus' eagle eats my liver, eternally.  How did this happen?

I thought my self was a good family man.  So I went out into the world and had a family, only to discover that this requires me to become a political and economical force.  I must sell my self to politicians and bankers to be a good family man.  I hate politicians and bankers, not least because I don't know any of them, and all the ones I know of seem to lack basic human qualities (like honesty, decency, humility, a sense of responsibility larger than their greed for profits or victory).  So I am a terrible family man.

I thought my self was a good Mormon, a good Christian.  So I went out into the world and tried to practice Mormon Christianity.  I read my scriptures (the Bible too) till they fell apart (literally and metaphorically).  I noticed every sin I committed and repented constantly and sincerely -- in private prayer and verbal confession to my priesthood leaders.  I paid tithing on my gross income.  I served a Mormon mission to northern Spain, where I did my very best to share my religion thoughtfully and non-confrontationally with people who had absolutely no use for it.  I attended Brigham Young University, where I tried to learn everything I could about early Christianity, which I was taught would be ontologically the same as modern Mormonism.  It isn't, for the record.  Worse than that, my religious practice eventually became so harmful to my self that I simply could not do it anymore.  I couldn't pretend that confessing sin made it less powerful in my life: my experience is that confession made sin a stronger influence, leading me to find it in almost every moment of every day that I lived.  I was utterly miserable as a good Mormon.  The rational arguments I was given to make me endure this misery without apostatizing did not work (because I put in the legwork to learn what early Christianity looks like, what early Mormonism looks like, and I saw clearly how neither one resembles Mormonism today).  So I let go and became a terrible Mormon.

I thought my self was a good Christian, but my experience investigating early Christianity made me realize that this identity was as weak and unstable as my Mormon one.  I believed -- and still believe -- in what I call human values (justice, decency, reciprocity, honesty, cooperation, etc.).  But historical Christianity adds a lot of extraneous stuff to these values, sometimes obscuring them altogether with expectations that the body of Christ function as a tool in the hand of some inspired leader, or text, or historical tradition.  I could not bring myself to submit unconditionally to leaders, interpreters, tradents (traditores!) -- not even when they called upon authoritative texts and traditions to justify their leadership, so I became a bad Christian.  The body of Christ, it seems to me, is built on war and death.  The eye, the foot, the hand, and other members all make war against each other, invoking the head to justify their quarrels, and the end is that they all come away slashed, burned, cut off, and crucified.  As soon as the church emerges in history, we have orthodox and heretics at one another's throats, and the schism continues today (as in the day of Joseph Smith, who called it "a war of words and tumult of opinions" -- in other times it has manifested as war in deadly earnest, the kind of war in which men, women, and children take up arms and kill one another).

My two cents?  If you meet Christ on the road to Damascus, prepare to be crucified.  Like every Christian, bad or good, I can offer you reasons for this faith: Nolite arbitrari quia venerim mittere pacem in terram; non veni pacem mittere sed gladium.  Omnes enim qui acceperint gladium gladio peribunt.     

I thought myself a good academic, so I went into the university.  Here I discovered yet another impossible conflict.  As a good academic, I am supposed to care passionately what other scholars working in my field think about information and questions deliberately removed from public relevance.  This pedantry manifests as multiple publications in academic venues (journals, or book-publishers expert in producing curios for libraries that no ordinary private citizen could afford to purchase even if he were inclined to read them).  I am also expected to interest modern undergraduates in my field, seducing them into thinking that I am not really the boring pedant I pretend to be with my colleagues.  So I am supposed to have a bucket-load of bulletproof publications under my belt guaranteeing my pedantry, while students give me rave reviews for being such a great comedian in class that they couldn't help but major in the particular brand of pedantry that I represent.

Why the requirement for a double life?  Well, the university needs money.  To raise money, it needs me to look smart (hence the requirement for pedantry), busy (hence the requirement for teaching and other service in addition to pedantry), fun (hence student evaluations), and profitable (hence all the insufferable bloviating about education being job-training, as though people investigated the liberal arts for the same reasons that they read technical manuals or sit through seminars on company policies and procedures).  What is the university doing with money?  Well, it is building bigger, fancier dorms (to attract more and richer undergraduates).  It is building bigger, fancier sports facilities (to attract more and richer undergraduates, who have a real taste for our modern American improvements on old Roman bread and circuses).  It is hiring more -- and more expensive -- bureaucrats to manage all these games.  It is also cranking out more tools like myself -- ignorant pedants so focussed on publishing more and more recondite information that they fail to notice how the whole system of cancerous growth is doomed to collapse, when people don't have the resources to pay $600,000+ per student.  No economy on earth can sustain the levels of consumption we are actively encouraging people (students, faculty, administrators, staff) to enjoy at the modern university.  The whole thing is simply Wall Street writ small in the Ivory Tower, which it turns out is just as vulnerable to human greed and ignorance as every other man-made institution in the history of history.

How am I supposed to ignore this colossal disaster going on all around me in academia?  How am I supposed to ignore colleagues and friends broken on the Wheel of Fortune to which we have hitched our academic apple-cart?  I cannot.  I cannot just burrow down into the library and compose my perfect, perfectly pedantic articles, pretending that I don't see people suffering all around me (students gulled into dead-end careers built on economic castles in the air, adjuncts struggling to survive in a culture that rejects them as useless failures, smirking punks with tenure passing righteous judgment on everyone else, administrators doing their best to make the whole charade appear stable and desirable).  Instead of writing those articles, I appear here emoting about the collapse of civilization and my personal existential angst.  So I am a terrible academic (and probably a terrible educator in general, at least at institutions which measure academic value in terms of perpetuating our current economic system, which I find rotten to the core in academia as on Wall Street).

After failing at so many things, it naturally occurs me to suspect (to my wife's frustration) that I am simply a failure.  My eternal self, the mask that I carry with me from one disaster to the next, is one that inevitably finds its weakness in every corporate environment.  I find my weakness and write it clearly upon my face in blood, sweat, and eventually tears.  As an individual, I have many wonderful friends and great experiences (that have taught me much and given me real cause to be grateful).  I take things well.  I am a good dependent, a good person to owe things to (since I don't demand retribution or restitution when circumstances make it inhumane to do so).  I am a terrible provider, though, a terrible person to be dependent upon (since I let debts go and refuse to fight seriously until my back is really to the wall, where I am no use to the religious, political, and economic mobs whose institutions create human justice in this world).  My tendency is entirely against the spirit of the age that demands growth, recovery, and an imperious hand maintaining the powers that be (in the face of information that indicates their incorrigible insolubility, to me and to others).  My integrity (decency? honesty? virtue?) as an individual human being requires me to commit social, religious, political, and economic suicide.  I hate what my personal integrity entails, for me and my dependents, but I love that integrity, too.  I cannot abandon it.  I have tried.  I spent much time and effort working to overcome my limitations -- the honest ignorance that keeps me from being a good family man, a good Mormon, a good Christian, or a good academic -- but after two decades my conclusion is that this exercise is futile.

This post represents my official surrender on all fronts.  I see my vulnerability in all the battlefields where I stand, where my self exists transient and impermanent. I see that I cannot heal that vulnerability, no matter where I hide myself, no matter what rituals I perform to any gods (who may or may not exist, like my self: questions of ontology don't matter to me anymore, if they ever did).  I see that I have had a good run.  Now I have finished the course.  I have fought the good fight.  I have kept the faith (the only faith I ever really had, which was my individual integrity).  In reliquo reposita est mihi iustitiae corona quam reddet mihi Dominus in illa die iustus iudex, non solum autem mihi sed et his qui diligunt adventum eius.  Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant.  

Raising the Children

Jared Diamond.  The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?  New York: Viking, 2012.  ISBN: 9780670024810.

There are many interesting ideas in this book, but this one struck me as something particularly worth mulling over (from pages 207-208):

States do have military and technological advantages, and advantages of vastly larger populations, over hunter-gatherers.  Throughout recent millennia, those advantages have enabled states to conquer hunter-gatherers, so that the modern world map is now divided completely among states, and few hunter-gatherer groups have survived.  But even though states are much more powerful than hunter-gatherer bands, that doesn't necessarily imply that states have better ways of raising their children.  Some child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherer bands may be ones that we could consider emulating ... I don't recommend that we return to the hunter-gatherer practices of selective infanticide, high risk of death in childbirth, and letting infants play with knives and get burned by fires.  Some other features of hunter-gatherer childhoods, like the permissiveness of child sex play, feel uncomfortable to many of us, even though it may be hard to demonstrate that they really are harmful to children.  Still other practices are now adopted by some citizens of state societies, but make others uncomfortable--such as having infants sleep in the same bedroom or the same bed as parents, nursing children until age three or four, and avoiding physical punishment of children.

But some other hunter-gatherer child-rearing practices may fit readily into modern state societies.  It's perfectly feasible for us to transport our infants vertically upright and facing forward, rather than horizontally in a pram or vertically upright but facing backwards in a pack.  We could respond quickly and consistently to an infant's crying, practise much more extensive allo-parenting, and have far more physical contact between infants and care-givers.  We could encourage self-invented play of children, rather than discourage it by consistently providing complicated so-called educational toys.  We could arrange for multi-age child playgroups, rather than playgroups consisting of a uniform age cohort.  We could maximize a child's freedom to explore, insofar as it is safe to do so.

I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there.  A recurring theme is that the other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children.  We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, video games, and books.  We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children.  These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children [or even ourselves, right?], but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly telling them what to do.  The adolescent identity-crises that plague American teen-agers aren't an issue for hunter-gatherer children.  The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that those admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of a long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting [voila the truly traditional family, which is not about sex or gender or any of that crap, at all], far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child's crying [easier with allo-parenting, i.e. more than two adults per child], and the minimal amount of physical punishment.

The chapter contains many more insights, but these paragraphs represent a pretty good summary.  What strikes me is that my own upbringing resembles a more "hunter-gatherer" one in certain ways.  My parents took me out of school after second grade, so the majority of my social contact occurred in mixed groups (containing adults and children of different ages, with relatively little of my time spent relating exclusively to age-mates).  I always had friends who were significantly older (and eventually younger) than I was, doing things I did not (and/or could not) do, and I did not really experience a "typical" adolescent identity crisis (though I did have one, in graduate school, which is where I finally awoke to the reality of the adult world in modern Western society as it exists outside the rhetoric people use to describe it).  As a result of my own experience, I don't have a finger on the pulse of society: I have never known or cared what "the American people" wants or likes, since in my experience "the American people" is a rhetorical fiction (three words reducing innumerable pluralities to an impossible unity).  I only relate meaningfully to the people I know, who are never going to be "the American people" (or the sinister "public servants" who minister to the needs of this chimaera).  When you come to me with plans for "the American people," I instinctively recoil--perceiving that you want to impose something on my people against their will, and that you feel this will be easier if you can invoke "the American people" as your justification (my mob is the only one that matters, so you had better roll over and do whatever I say).  I don't like the American people--paradoxically, since I embrace many tenets that are historically fundamental to the American social experiment (e.g. the idea that individual human beings have alienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, even when they may choose to exert those rights in ways that I would not, personally: until you commit clear criminal damage against another person, I don't mind how you choose to express yourself).

The environment I experienced as a child was necessarily much less rigid than the one I have encountered as an adult: my family lived on the edge of an old Southern rus rustica slowly turning into modern suburbia.  We had an enormous garden.  We spent lots of time together, working on a variety of different things (garden plants, landscaping, schoolwork, cooking, cleaning, installing solar panels, books, bees, church stuff, martial arts).  We didn't "play" much with outsiders: we went to activities where there were agendas we pursued, agendas that might include playing (e.g. at church or the dojo) but were not necessarily defined by it.  We had toys, but the best toys we had (before computers) were those we made ourselves.  While we were active in a religion that many see (with good reason) as patriarchal (in a pretty chauvinist way), we did not discriminate against women ourselves (at least not on purpose: I never thought of myself as qualitatively better than any of the females I interacted with because of my genitalia; what mattered to me was always being a good person, and I knew many women who were really good people, in every sense of the word--morally upstanding, professionally skilled, and socially adept).

Entering the adult world was disruptive and scary for me.  Unlike the hunter-gatherers Diamond writes about, I did not feel that my childhood prepared me for adult reality.  But this was not because my parents pulled me out of school: I know plenty of people whose time in school made them even more vulnerable than I feel.  It was not that I lacked something growing up, really.  I liked my childhood.  I feel like it prepared me to do many good things (e.g. how to work hard, how to get along with many different kinds of people, how to be self-motivated, how to solve problems in real life, how to be comfortable outdoors, how to embrace alternatives to modern conveniences when they become obnoxious or inconvenient).  But it did not prepare me well to fit into the world of age- and class-segregated professionals whose ranks I was supposed to join upon finishing my stint in the university (which I am at last about to do!).  After 10 years bumbling around in pursuit of terminal degrees that might land me remunerative employment (if Zeus pulls my lot from the right jar), I feel like there is a great gap in American culture--a gap between theory and practice--that leaves many people like me dangerously blind and helpless.
  
Hunter-gatherers grow up knowing how they will live.  They learn to hunt and gather as their ancestors did (and do).  I grow up being told that if I am "good" (at something, e.g. solving some kind of abstruse problem on a college entrance exam), then someone will give me a "job" (doing something, that could be anything).  I frequently heard advice like this: "Get an education!  And everything will work out.  God (or somebody else wise and powerful, e.g. the President) will provide."  This was disconcerting, particularly as I came closer and closer to failure in my academic efforts.  I had friends who were smart, worked hard, and failed.  Knowing them pretty well, I could not see their failure as a reflection of shortcomings I did not possess.  I saw my own human weakness, and it seemed a lot like theirs.  I learned to live with a constant sense of my own irredeemable inadequacy.  Where my childhood gave me a way of life that reinforced my security, showing me how I was competent and could provide livelihood (to myself and my family, i.e. my cooperative collective), my adulthood has offered me only alienation: its way of life is to make me subservient to masters I never know, subject to impersonal forces of supply and demand whose operation I cannot see for myself (until the pink slip arrives on my desk and it is too late).  As a child, I felt there were clear expectations of me, and that I was able to see and meet those expectations.  They made sense.  (If you don't tend the squash plants, they will be eaten by bugs, and we will have no squash for dinner.)  As an adult, I am not sure what people want.  (If you get bad reviews from teachers, colleagues, or students, your bosses might reward you or fire you, depending on circumstances too numerous and mutually contradictory for you to make heads or tails of).  I don't know that I meet expectations.  I am pretty sure that much of the time I don't.  I live in constant fear of my little job--fear that I might lose it and become a burden on my family, fear that I might keep it and become a burden on society (which might not need people like me plugging away diligently at whatever little job I happen to be doing).

As I see it, my parents had for themselves clear goals that I could see and support.  I saw and shared their goal to have squash for dinner (or solar panels to supplement the grid, or blueberry bushes to make breakfast more interesting).  My bosses in society (political leaders, religious leaders, academic supervisors) either don't have clear goals (what do the American people want? the Mormon people? academia? professors? students? bosses?) or have goals I am not comfortable with (we want people to serve us against their will with goods and services to which we feel entitled for many reasons that you will find laid out in excruciating, impossible detail in our mission statement).  I don't know what success looks like in the adult world.  Actually, I know exactly what it looks like: it looks just like failure, except that I come out of it triumphant (so far), while not all of my friends and colleagues are so fortunate.  I feel like I am a piece of meat in the adult world, a little pawn being pushed around by bigger men in a game whose stakes I am only barely able to see.  Instead of teaching me how to fend for myself, the way my family tried to do, social institutions have preferred to teach me how to serve them: pay us your tithes and taxes, whenever you can; when for some reason you cannot, remember that this is the fault of our political and religious opponents, whom you should oppose always and at all cost.

I wish I knew how to hunt, how to build, how to survive (and enjoy life) without a job--or continuous access to modern luxuries that many of us have been socialized to regard as essential (e.g. electricity, air conditioning, automotive transportation, grocery stores, hospitals, and my least favorite, "insurance").  Useful education, in my view, would teach me how to tend to my needs at minimal cost (to myself and others), making me a maximally autonomous individual.  But that is not the kind of education I have received at church or school.  Paradoxically, education in an institution does not really set people free: any freedom it offers comes at the expense of some self-sacrifice, some self-effacing contribution to the institution.  This is not an inherently poisonous or awful thing.  I don't mind giving something in exchange for something else.  But it becomes problematic when I give institutions everything I am, and all they can give me in return is empty promises like, "Hope for change!" and "God will provide!"  I didn't need to pay thousands of dollars in tithing, taxes, or tuition for that kind of knowledge, people.  I don't need to put in thousands of man-hours reading books and writing up reports that I then tear to shreds and write over, if the end-result of all my labors is a shrug: "We don't need professional humanists (or buggy-whip artisans) any more.  You should have chosen a better career, one that made you really useful."  Well, if I could see what utility means in this obscene place we call the world (or the market or even, gag, Wall Street), then maybe I might know how to serve it better.  If you could show me something to believe in or work for that weren't a pie-in-the-sky founded on transparent nonsense (or blatant theft, Wall Street), then maybe I could make something you might like (or at least avoid making myself a drag on society in pursuit of something worthless).

I am personally satisfied, at least at the moment, with the fruit of my labors as an adult.  If I am fired tomorrow, I will walk away from my position with some good experiences, and no student debt (thank all the people who founded scholarships for clueless undergrads with a taste for reading ancient Latin and Greek).  I will take whatever skills and aptitudes I have and seek a place to apply them meaningfully.  But I won't count on their translating easily into any of the narratives I heard as a student (narratives in which it was taken for granted that I would become a tenured professor, take out a mortgage on a house, have five kids, and retire to tend roses at the age of 65, providing a regular source of revenue to society in the form of tithes and taxes).  I don't think it is realistic to plot this kind of future, ignoring the increasingly obvious reality that it can always be subverted (when I fail to make tenure; when the education bubble bursts and tenure disappears entirely along with all the "free" money; when there is not time or food enough to keep another kid in my apartment; when the housing market prices us out; when Japanese beetles eat all the roses and the result of my constant worry is premature senility).  I guess what I am saying is that I wish school were more of a training ground for honest-to-goodness entrepreneurs (not just the pretenders who want to talk but cannot act with real responsibility), and less of an assembly-line reducing authentic, expansive human beings ("I contain multitudes") to narrow skill-sets designed to serve the inhuman and inhumane business-needs of corporations like GoldmanSachs, Monsanto, or the US federal government.  I don't really want a job.  I never did.  I want a life.  That is all.  It doesn't have to be easy.  It doesn't have to be expensive (in terms of capital: it will always require hard work, from me most of all, but I like that; I want to work at something I believe in, something that isn't the rat-race I see at the center of adult American life these days).  But it has to be real, and I have to be able to pursue it in ways that are authentic and maximally independent (respecting my individual autonomy: I don't mind being told what to do, but I do mind being expected to offer abject deference when my boss appears manifestly duplicitous or incompetent--as all bosses do sometimes, myself included).   

Needy America

"We don't need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval Office. We need a President who will fight for American jobs and fight for American manufacturing."  Barack Obama (22 June 2012).

In practical terms, this pretty rhetoric boils down to something like the following.

We don't need a robust economy. We need a fragile protectionist racket.

We don't need goods and services. We need more busywork: more people manning institutions "too big to fail" (too big to fail without dragging us all down, especially now that the government has decided to "save" them with the taxpayers' money:  "Ladies and gentlemen, the Titanic has struck an iceberg, but don't worry, the crew will chain you to the mast shortly and everything will be fine.  Meanwhile, please enjoy the game of musical chairs that we have arranged to while away the time this election year.").

We don't need a viable currency. We need everyone to earn lots of worthless money. (Thanks, Lords Greenspan and Bernanke!)

We don't need individual citizens to think seriously about what is going on in the world (let alone turn such thoughts into actions). We the peons of the United States of America should leave the thinking to enlightened philosopher-kings (like Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney, who are both oligarchs fighting to maintain the ascendancy of the established, cancerous bureaucracy that is our federal government).

Why do so many of us take this kind of piffle seriously? 

No One Ever Has It All

Anne-Marie Slaughter.  "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."  Atlantic (July/August 2012).

From my perspective (which others are free to disagree with), the issues Slaughter raises are more human than feminist. I would not want the kind of job Slaughter takes (a distant one requiring all-day commitments, no leisure at all). People who take those jobs, men or women, give up things (things I am not willing to give up).

What I see coming out of this is an honest reassessment of what it takes to work at high levels of an overgrown bureaucracy. The pressure may simply be more than humanity can bear. Maybe the lesson we learn from this is that no one can have it all, that more government is not always going to be better, that we need to find better ways of living (requiring less centralization, less bureaucracy, less self-sacrificing ascetics willing and able to give themselves wholly and utterly to the Machine).

In antiquity, people knew that bureaucrats didn't have lives: they were often monks, eunuchs, cripples, etc. Somewhere along the American journey, we picked up this idea that we can do anything if we just engineer things right. Maybe this is true. Or maybe not.

An Open Letter to Public Servants

Dear Representatives,

Thank you for all of your good intentions.  I mean that sincerely.  Most of you, I think, are just trying to do what is best for everyone (constituents first of course, and you cannot really help but pay more attention to the loudest constituents, i.e. the richest and/or the most obnoxious).  I understand enough about your position to know that it is not an easy one.  I want to do what I can to make it easier.  So here goes.

First off, know that I do not really consider you my representatives.  A real representative is someone I engage to present my point of view (like a lawyer I hire to represent me in court or a business associate who represents my interests to a third party).  The vast majority of you, including those in whose district(s) I reside, do not do that.  And let's be honest: with some 300 million people in this country, how could you?  It would not be responsible to let the concerns of a single constituent override those of his fellows (who number in the thousands or millions, depending on what level of the government hierarchy you occupy).  We like to pretend that every individual has political power as an intrinsic right, but the truth is that he doesn't (and hasn't for a pretty long time: our country started its life as a republic, not a democracy, and the people with the most power here have always been the lucky few who were wealthy and/or well-placed).

So now that we have done away with the fiction that you really care what I have to say, I am going to go ahead and offer some thoughts anyway.  I won't be surprised if you ignore them entirely.  But it will make me feel better to get them off my chest, and maybe some of you will take a human interest in the candid ideas of a random constituent.

I have a few quaint ideas about the way government should be.  On a good day (in my ideal world), you guys keep us from waking up murdered in our beds (or raped or robbed).  On a really good day, you do nothing (because no one is being attacked: this doesn't mean that you sit at your desks twiddling your thumbs; you get a life outside of government, and a good day gives you time to pursue it uninterrupted, doing something that is actually useful).  You don't run hospitals (or give out medication).  You don't run schools (or give out education).  You don't fight wars unless they are inevitable (e.g. Mexican tanks just crossed the border with Texas).  You don't even (necessarily) keep the roads going (though if you want the job, maybe we could let you have it, provided that you do it as well as or better than your competition).  You are there (particularly at the federal level) as a last resort, when all other systems break down.  You are not the front line.  No one depends on you unless they have nowhere else to turn (I do mean nowhere), and when they do turn to you, at last, they want you to keep them from being killed (or raped or robbed): they don't expect you to give them easy money (whether through tax breaks or sinecure "jobs" or unemployment benefits or Ponzi schemes disguised as healthcare or bailouts of bankrupt industries whose time of profitability has passed: these are all fundamentally the same thing--you rob Peter to pay Paul and then flash a badge so that we know better than to resent the theft).

I recognize that my pipe dream is not universally popular, and I am willing to concede that it may never be practically feasible (at least not as I have written it here).  But you need all the alternative governmental models you can get at this point, considering how you are running your current gig into the ground.  As matters stand, none of you seems to understand what it means to do good business (or in other words, provide real public service).  I can forgive this, since it seems many of our businessmen (particularly those who cross paths most with you) are similarly handicapped.  Let me clue you in: you need to generate income, and the income you generate should exceed or at least equal your outflow.  I think you already know this.  Unfortunately, your understanding never moves beyond the abstract balance sheet to the concrete realities that that sheet represents.  You think that as long as the numbers on the sheet line up (no matter how sloppily), everything is hunky-dory.  So you come up with some really creative mathematics--so sloppy that they don't even fool you all the time--and back them up with this really cool thing called the Federal Reserve that lets you conjure money out of thin air.  The only problem is that eventually, that money has to buy stuff in the real world.  It has to stand for something.  Right now, it stands for labor and the fruits of labor (commodities like food, clothing, shelter).  You give me money, and I work for you (on the understanding that the money you give me can be exchanged for the fruit of someone's labor).  You seem to labor under the illusion that all economic woes are a matter of your ability to create and mobilize money, forgetting that money is only useful insofar as it represents other things that are really useful.  Let me give you a little reality check.

Your creative math and Federal Reserve don't make more people (just more money to be spread out among however many people already exist).  Your creative math and Federal Reserve do not create opportunities for profitable labor that don't already exist.  This is an important thing to notice.  Money only represents opportunities that already exist: if I was stranded on a desert island with no resources at all except for an infinite supply of money, I would die (unless I could jerry-rig some kind of paper-mache boat, using the money as a commodity rather than as money).  Thus, your creative math and Federal Reserve don't make more commodities (just more money to be paid for whatever commodities someone else has already created or will create in future).  Every time you make more money out of thin air, as you continue to do in an effort to support the illusion that our country is really rich, you are promising the world that taxpayers like me are going to give them more and more profitable labor: at some point in the increasingly near future, assuming present trends hold, you will have sold me and my kids into perpetual bondage to service your runaway debt (we will be building pyramids while you "supervise" at a convenient distance, ensconced in your ivory tower).  I don't appreciate this (to put it mildly).

A word about economic stimulus, which you often invoke to make complaints like mine go away.  The idea that spending money makes things better is ridiculous, just about as ridiculous as the idea that demand drives supply (if this were true, Haiti would be rich and Switzerland would be broke: please stop listening to idiots like Paul Krugman and read some history or at least some real economists, like Jean Baptiste-Say).  Paying billions of dollars to save bad businesses does not do anyone any good in the long-term: the idiots will just run the ship aground on the same rock.  Read some history (again).  Humpty Dumpty never learns, and you will never be smart enough to put him together again (no matter how many horses and men you have).  Really useful "stimulus" is about learning to do for oneself and others in fundamental ways.  A good builder will never be homeless, as long as there are natural resources and tools available; a good secretary is useless outside of the office.  And yet, your economic plan seems to be for everyone to go to secretary school (on loans you generate from thin air), to work as little as possible for a large salary (necessary to pay the loans), and to retire early on a hefty pension (just like public servants in Greece: how's that working for them, by the way?  Is burning Athens to the ground just their way of providing necessary opportunities for future growth, i.e. the latest economic stimulus?).  What a load of bullshit.  

As I understand the situation, you are technically bankrupt right now: the only reason you haven't gone the way of Lehman Brothers or Greece is that people have this faith that you will revive.  They could be right: you might still turn things around.  But current trends say that you will not.  What are you doing now?  Well, you just gave your employees a nice bonus (which my kids will be happy to pay for when the time comes, I'm sure).  You remain committed to your role as world bully (oops, I meant to say policeman), despite the waste of resources (not to mention the acrimony) that this causes at home and abroad.  (Anything for the greater good, right?  Is that how you plan to deal with the debt crisis ultimately, by holding a gun to somebody's head?  Just remember that even Don Corleone doesn't always get what he wants: the fact that I would love to offer Newt Gingrich a mansion on the moon doesn't mean that I am able to deliver.)  And you are now fighting furiously amongst yourselves to determine some very important issues like, "Should we spend the money we don't have on contraceptives or Bibles?  Should we let gay people call their unions marriages or not?  Should we bail out this stupid business or that one?"  Seriously?  It's amazing how passionate you are about this stuff.  Great show.  One would almost think that these decisions really mattered, that they were something more than re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic (I am stealing this metaphor from Mark Steyn, I think, but I thought of it well before he came out in print with it).  No matter who you are, you have to get your own crap together before you try to clean up everybody else's.  And yours isn't remotely together.  It's scattered all over, and it smells terrible.  Please, stop quibbling about nonsense and just balance the budget already, before nature has her way with you, and you become the next Greece.  As much as part of me would like to see you held really accountable (for once), I don't want that for you (at least not as long as my kids represent part of your economic assets).

One last word, and then I'm through.  The worst thing about your position is that you cannot win the way you want to.  You cannot please everybody.  You have to piss somebody off.  I understand that.  If it comes down to it, I am willing to be the guy you throw under the bus (what choice do I have, honestly?).  But what I am not willing to do is listen quietly to any more stupid lies.  There is nothing I or anyone else can do to guarantee that I have life, liberty, or happiness.  You can pass laws all day.  You can print money till the dollar is worthless.  Until you aren't broke, none of your promises mean anything to me.  Until you stand for something other than the party line ("this is what we all say around here to get elected"), I don't care who you are, and I will not be voting for you (I'm one of those "apathetic" voters who fail to turn out when the election is to decide whether we are to be raped by an ass or an elephant: it amounts to the same thing).  Until you are willing to put some skin in the game (e.g. take a principled stand and then stick to it even when your career dies as a result), I do not respect you (though I will certainly obey the law to the utmost of my ability; I respect human values, including those that conduce to peaceful life in society).  You do not have to agree with me to earn my respect.  You do not have to cater to me, trying to buy me with non-existent benefits or the illusion of impossible growth.  You just have to tell me the truth, and stand by it.  Stop pretending like we're all going to be OK no matter how bad things are.  Stop pretending like you have all the answers.  Stop pretending that the answer is handing out more money to your friends (as opposed to the other guy's friends, as though it matters whether you steal to support gays or Catholics, rich or poor: the bottom line is that more thieves always means fewer really useful craftsmen).  Just stop.

Sincerely,

John Q. Public

Hell

Some interesting quotes from Postman's Technopoly.  The first quote is actually from C. S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, x):

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin."  The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint.  It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps.  In those we see its final result.  But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.  Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Part of my faith crisis was waking up to the realization that there is no such thing as an enlightened bureaucracy.  They all tell you they are wonderful, and they are all lying.  Some do more and more obvious harm than others, but all are harmful--especially if you believe the crap they always tell you about how they are saving the world.  If the world is saved, it will be at least as much in spite of bureaucracy as because of it (though I am sure any bureaucracy that survives will give itself credit as our savior, or--more insidiously--as his humble instrument).

The second quote is from Postman (85-86):

Bureaucracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory--except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goods are necessarily less worthy, if not irrelevant.  That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a "tyranny" and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.  The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques designed to serve social institutions to an autonomous meta-institution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid- and late-nineteenth century: rapid industrial growth, improvements in transportation and communication, the extension of government into ever larger realms of public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of governmental structures.  To these were added, in the twentieth century, the information explosion and what we might call the "bureaucracy effect": as techniques for managing information became more necessary, expensive, and complex, the number of people and structures required to manage those techniques grew, and so did the amount of information generated by bureaucratic techniques.  This created the need for bureaucracies to manage and coordinate bureaucracies, then for additional structures and techniques to manage the bureaucracies that coordinated bureaucracies, and so on--until bureaucracy became, to borrow again Karl Kraus's comment on psychoanalysis, the disease for which it purported to be the cure.  Along the way, it ceased to be merely the servant of social institutions and became their master.  Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them.  More important, it defines what our problems are--and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency.  As Lewis suggests, this makes bureaucracies exceedingly dangerous, because though they were originally designed to process only technical information, they are now commonly employed to address problems of a moral, social, and political nature.  The bureaucracy of the nineteenth century was largely concerned with making transportation, industry, and the distribution of goods more efficient.  Technopoly's bureaucracy has broken loose from such restrictions and now claims sovereignty over all of society's affairs.

The single greatest problem with bureaucracy is that efficiency is not an unmixed blessing.  It inevitably creates fragility (as Nassim Taleb would say), rendering those who rely on it blind to important realities, realities that are inefficient.  (Or, as bureaucrat Boyd K. Packer would say, truths that are not very useful.)  Two more quotes from Postman (88-89):

The role of the expert is to concentrate on one field of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left to assist in solving a problem.  This process works fairly well in situations where only a technical solution is required and there is no conflict with human purposes--for example in space rocketry or the construction of a sewer system. It works less well in situations where technical requirements may conflict with human purposes, as in medicine or architecture.  And it is disastrous when applied to situations that cannot be solved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, family life, and problems of personal maladjustment.  I assume I do not need to convince the reader that there are no experts--there can be no experts--in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making.  All of this is a figment of the Technopolist's imagination, made plausible by the use of technical machinery [like fancy documents purporting to illustrate the one true family], without which the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an intruder and an ignoramus ... There is, for example, no test that can measure a person's intelligence.  Intelligence is a general term used to denote one's capacity to solve real-life problems in a variety of novel contexts.  It is acknowledged by everyone except experts that each person varies greatly in such capacities, from consistently effective to consistently ineffective, depending on the kinds of problems requiring solution.  If, however, we are made to believe that a test can reveal precisely the quantity of intelligence a person has, then, for all institutional purposes, a score on a test becomes his or her intelligence.  The test transforms an abstract and multifaceted meaning into a technical and exact term that leaves out everything of importance.  One might even say that an intelligence test is a tale told by an expert, signifying nothing.

Nonetheless, the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery.  We come to believe that our score is our intelligence, or our capacity for creativity or love or pain.  We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as "I approve" and "I disapprove."

I see this nonsense playing out all the time in different places.  In education, we mistake scores for learning (and the ability to learn).  In church, we mistake adherence to arbitrary (and even harmful) rules for piety.  In government and business, we mistake sound-bytes for sound policy, and assume that the talking suits whose companies we support actually know what the heck they are doing because they get up on time, clean up nicely, and diligently show us charts decorated with impressive technical jargon.  Everywhere, we trust people to know stuff that they don't really know, even when their incompetence becomes truly dangerous, destroying our ability to function as individuals and as a society.  How am I supposed to become intellectually competent if my chief aim is to get good scores on tests, pleasing masters, colleagues, and students?  How I am supposed to become morally competent if every decision I make has to pass muster with an incoherent book of rules compiled by bureaucrats in Salt Lake City (or Colorado City, or Canterbury, or Rome, or any other major religious center)?  How am I supposed to be financially and politically capable if my actionable resources can be appropriated on a moment's notice to save stupid businesses lucky enough to be "too big to fail"?  In a world where I exist merely as an individual consumer--helpless, needy, and stupid--how am I supposed to do anything worth doing at all?

The worst part of my faith crisis has been my inability to talk coherently about this aspect of it.  I express a disillusion with technology in general, and immediately others (not just Mormons) rush in with their pet technical solution to my lack of faith.

"Yes!  It can be really frustrating dealing with idiots like George Bush and his henchmen.  Vote for Obama and this will all get better ... The reason it isn't better yet is that the evil Republicans still have power."  [If you want the Republican version of this, just change a few words, swapping Obama for Bush, and vice versa, and referencing evil Democrats.]

"Yes!  The church comes with all kinds of people.  Sometimes, inexplicably, they speak as men when we all think that they are speaking for God.  We have to learn to ignore this, have faith that it will all turn out right, and keep exercising our religious freedom to call other people to repentance."

"Yes!  It can be really frustrating dealing with religious bigots like Boyd Packer and his henchmen.  Come to my church and this will all get better ... The reason it isn't better yet is that you are still holding on to icky Mormon ideas instead of embracing true Christianity." [Imagine the face of the Reverend Jeffress here, and maybe someone like Ted Haggard for good measure].

"Yes!  Being an academic is hard sometimes.  Maybe if you went to another workshop, or published a paper, or applied for your 300th job, or worked more diligently on your dissertation, you wouldn't be in this mess."

I have spent much of my life being broken--not politically savvy enough, or righteous enough, or smart enough, or diligent enough, or whatever.  After fifteen years (starting in adolescence, when I became aware of other people as more than entertainment), I am still broken.  But the stupid bureaucracies that push me all over the place are broken too.  They think they know what they are doing.  They think they are wise.  They think they righteous.  They think they deserve the right to put me in my place, humbly enslaving me to the greater good that they represent (but can never represent intelligibly, for some reason: pond scum like me just doesn't get it, I guess).  The difference between them and me, as I see it, is that I admit my limits and refuse to go past them, while they don't.  I try to be morally responsible.  They don't.  I answer for my mistakes.  They don't answer for theirs.  I am interested in changing things in fundamental ways, so that I don't have to rely on them all the time (though I have nothing against their going on without me).  The only change that they welcome is the one that puts them in control of the status quo, where I am comfortably stuck under their thumb.  Their heaven on earth is my hell.